During my break between the fall and spring semester of classes, I binge watched all six seasons of The Nanny in about three weeks. In the final stretch of episodes, I slowed down my pace because I dreaded leaving the world of this little show behind. Sure enough, by the time Barbra Streisand’s “The Way We Were” played over Fran’s last moments in the Sheffield brownstone, I was sobbing. I don’t usually react so viscerally to fiction, and the intensity of my feelings worried me as days passed and my chest still ached every time my thoughts wandered to the show. It wasn’t until after the Capitol riots shocked me out of my fugue that I was able to put my feelings in perspective. Still, I wondered: Why does this show have such a hold on me and so many other queer people?

 My first thought was that The Nanny’s similarities to The Sound of Music resonated with me; after all, co-creator Fran Drescher’s original pitch for the sitcom was, “It’s kinda a spin on The Sound of Music, only instead of Julie Andrews, I come to the door.”[1] Like Maria, Fran Fine is a social outsider who uses unconventional means to restore love in the home of a wealthy widower and his children, and eventually marries into the family. Even C.C. and Niles neatly parallel the campy roles of “quintessential vampire lesbian and gay esthete” that the Baroness and Max assume in The Sound of Music.[2] Both works also temper the sentimentality of their respective stories with a style of camp performance (of varying degrees of subtlety) that creates a slight distance from the material at hand.

 As Stacy Wolf documents in A Problem Like Maria, there is a history of lesbian affinity with The Sound of Music that can be traced in pop culture, from a character in Meg Wolitzer’s novel Friends for Life explaining her childhood crush on Julie Andrews when she comes out to her friends, to Alison Bechdel describing her erotic feelings for Maria as a child in Are You My Mother?[3] Like Bechdel, who reflects, “It’s hard to say which Maria I desired more—the child she was to the nuns at the convent, the lover she was to Captain von Trapp, or the enlivening mother she was to the repressed children,” I desired Maria multiply.[4] I didn’t have the language to describe my fantasies about Maria as lesbian when I first saw the film at seven- or eight-years-old, but I recognize my fantasies as such today when I watch The Nanny. (I picture myself shopping with Fran. I think about how if I were Sheffield I wouldn’t drag my feet for years before proposing to Fran. I envy and desire Fran’s body.)

 As much pleasure as I derive from the fairytale-like romance between Fran and Sheffield, I still have reservations. Like many fans, I watched episode after episode wondering if Fran and Sheffield would ever get together, but when they finally did, the feminist in me was bothered by the fact that they were married without Fran resolving the issues she explored in therapy. Her therapist, Dr. Jack Miller (excellently portrayed by the late Spalding Gray), attempted to help Fran feel mature, independent, and complete without being married. After Sheffield proposed to Fran, Dr. Miller never made another appearance, but Fran’s desperation for male approval and low self-esteem persisted, especially since she was no longer employed as a nanny.

 I find some solace, however, in the knowledge that Drescher never wanted Fran and Sheffield to marry. CBS issued an ultimatum—they wanted a Fran and Sheffield wedding to boost the show’s ratings, or else The Nanny would not be renewed for a sixth season. Drescher admitted that CBS set “certain criteria” for the show to meet, and I suspect this may be why the show abandoned the therapy storyline and pivoted to committing totally to Fran and Sheffield’s relationship.[5] It might also explain why the sixth season invested in laying the foundation for each of the adult characters to start nuclear families: Fran and Sheffield move to Los Angeles with Grace and their newborn twins, and after C.C. and Niles get married, C.C. finds out that she’s pregnant. The latter two developments are curious considering C.C.’s consistent disdain for children and the frequent jokes alluding to C.C. and Niles’s queerness. Davis confessed that “he didn’t buy” that C.C. and Niles “would end up married” since they had always “been so oil and water.”[6] One wonders if Drescher had more control over the trajectory of the series, if it would have hewn so close to heteronormative conventions of “happily ever after.”

 It’s worth pointing out that the network’s strategy proved ineffective; The Nanny’s ratings season six ratings suffered, and likely in large part because viewers no longer had any incentive to tune in to find out if Fran and Sheffield would get together. I think there might also be a correlation between the lower ratings and the limits that Fran and Sheffield’s marriage put on the comedy writing. Fran’s misadventures couldn’t wreak as much havoc as they did before, lest her relationship to Sheffield be jeopardized. In fact, Fran’s missteps often end up miraculously working in her favor, like in “The Fran in the Mirror” when Fran uses Sheffield’s name in a bad business deal that ends up turning a profit, or in “Fran Gets Shushed” when Fran drives all of Sheffield’s prospective investors away, only to find a new rich investor through a random act of kindness.

 My perception of Fran’s antics being reigned in during season six reminds me of how one of Wolf’s ethnographic subjects recalled, “I do have a memory that once she [Maria] got married and turned heterosexual, there was something sad about it. At that point in the film, my identification switched to the Captain. Then it seemed more fun to have her than to be what happened to her.”[7] Once Maria marries and integrates into the von Trapp family, she is no longer a force of disorder. She relinquishes freedom and becomes less interesting as she assumes the conventional roles of mother and wife. Fran is similarly domesticated by her marriage to Sheffield. It’s not that she loses her individuality, but that she finally does exactly what women are “supposed” to do. Even though previously she pursued heterosexual relationships, she was funnier and queerer because she always failed. Jack Halberstam writes in The Queer Art of Failure, “Where feminine success is always measured by male standards, and gender failure often means being relieved of the pressure to measure up to patriarchal ideals, not succeeding at womanhood can offer unexpected pleasures.”[8] Fran’s gender failure in the form of perpetual singlehood is relatable to queer spectators who will never achieve success as defined my male standards because of their choice in partners.

 Drescher, for her part, attributes much of The Nanny’s popularity with the gay community to the show’s camp sensibility, which she claims was infused into the show because she and her ex-husband, Peter Marc Jacobson (who came out as gay after The Nanny wrapped), created it.[9] This sensibility is especially noticeable in Fran’s fashion. (Fran’s wardrobe has developed its own cult following through social media platforms like Instagram’s @whatfranwore). For example, when asked about the best queer TV to watch during lockdown last spring, Alaska Thunderfuck 3000 of RuPaul’s Drag Race fame named The Nanny: “The writing is so good and very queer in its punch lines and delivery, but it’s worth watching just for the clothes. The fashion design on Fran Drescher is ridiculous, and so drag. I would wear any of those outfits!” (Alaska also agrees with my interpretation of Niles as queer: “They write him straight, but honey, come on…”).[10] What Alaska recognizes in Drescher’s fashion design is what in “Notes on Camp,” Susan Sontag describes as camp’s “relish for the exaggeration of sexual characteristics and personality mannerisms.” Sontag’s examples include the “great stylists of temperament and mannerism” like Bette Davis, Barbara Stanwyck, Tallulah Bankhead, and Edwige Feuillière, and the “corny flamboyant femaleness” of Jayne Mansfield, Gina Lollobrigida, Virginia Mayo, and Jane Russell.[11] (Coincidentally, former CBS Jeff Sagansky called Drescher a “Russell” because she “had the curves of Jane Russell, the comic tim[ing] of Rosalind Russell and the tenacity of a Jack Russell.”)[12]

 In The Nanny, Fran heightens her laugh, her voice, her facial expressions, and accentuates her outrageous glam outfits with dramatic descents down the Sheffields’ foyer staircase. Her femininity is so loud and overstated that it draws attention to its own artificiality. This performance of femininity is just another form of Fran’s gender failure; as Wolf contends that “Any woman who defies gender norms,” even through exaggerated femininity like Fran, “is also in a contradictory relationship to heterosexual femininity and can appear lesbian.”[13] For these reasons, Fran reads to me as a femme lesbian, whose femininity, like Amber Hollibaugh remarks in the 1982 “Femme Tapes,” “is about irony” and functions as “a statement about the construction of gender” rather than just an appropriation of gender.”[14]

 In Fran, I see a femme mode of camp I was recently introduced to through Jenny Fran Davis’s essay in The LA Review of Books called “High Femme Camp Antics,” or HFCA. Davis writes that “HFCA is a mode of disidentification, an embrace of feminine performance that negotiates its inclusion in mainstream representations of women and lesbians by neither assimilation nor opposition.” It also “figures as a failure of language and a refusal to speak, to say things outright, a wink or a dance rather than a streamlined missive.”[15] Even if one doesn’t see the signifiers of femme lesbian in Fran, her behavior can still be classified as HFCA because it is, in Rhea Ashely Hoskin’s words, “an aesthetic, an erotic, and a politic,” not an identity.[16] HFCA is Fran surprising Sheffield by wearing a bulky hoodie and telling him she’s quit dressing for men, so he won’t see her parading in miniskirts anymore, then ditching the hoodie in favor of a little Versace dress as soon as she’s out the door. HFCA is Fran sitting on Sheffield’s dress in a miniskirt with her legs crossed and whining, “Mr. Sheffield…”

 Drescher theorized that another reason queer people responded to The Nanny was because her character was “a fish out of water” and “boy, was I [she] swimming upstream.”[17] Drescher’s metaphor aptly conveys the multiplicity of reasons for her otherness in the Sheffield household: it’s a blue collar meets blue blood story and Fran’s ethnic difference is magnified by her Jewish womanhood, a factor which further complicates her gender performance. Amy-Jill Levine writes that the Jewish woman is “more and less than ‘woman’” and Carol Ockman states that the Jewish woman is “womanhood gone awry.”[18] Fran’s frequent use of Yiddish turns of phrase and her resistance to assimilation distance her from “the ideal of the feminine in American culture,” but Fran doesn’t capitulate.[19] Queer viewers may find Fran appealing because they don’t conform to heteronormative, patriarchal gender expectations either. Fran embraces what makes her different; instead of Fran adopting their patrician ways, it’s the Sheffields who become fluent in her Yiddishisms.

 Finally, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that even more so than with CC. and Niles, I find pleasure in interpreting the antagonism between C.C. and Fran as sexually charged. Though C.C. is far from butch, the juxtaposition of her muted career-woman femininity with Fran’s hyperfeminine drag renders them something like a butch/femme pair. Who could forget the peck on the cheek Fran gives C.C. under the mistletoe? Or the kiss on the lips C.C. gets from Fran the night that Sheffield finally wins a Tony? Certainly, neither I, nor YouTube user mounVchan who edited a video of C.C. and Fran to Katy Perry’s “I Kissed A Girl.” Then there’s the episode “Oy Vey, You’re Gay,” in which Fran hesitates before turning down Sheffield’s lesbian publicist, or “Mommy and Mai,” which bizarrely figures Fran and Val as lesbian co-parents. Possibilities for resistant lesbian readings of The Nanny abound…

Notes

[1] Fran Drescher, Enter Whining (New York: Reagan Books, 1996), 126.

[2] Stacy Wolf, A Problem Like Maria (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002), 220.

[3] Ibid., 211.

[4] Alison Bechdel, Are You My Mother? (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012), 126.

[5] Bronte Coy, “Fran Drescher Reveals the Alternate Series Ending She Wanted for The Nanny,” News.com.au, last modified June 25, 2018, news.com.au/entertainment/tv/flashback/fran-drescher-reveals-the-alternate-series-ending-she-wanted-for-the-nanny/news-story/e771bec4d428f77633e303a0eedfd3cc.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Wolf, A Problem Like Maria, 17.

[8] Judith Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 4.

[9] Rose Dommu, “Fran Drescher Is Still Slaying Us with Her Sass and Class” Out, February 20, 2020, out.com/print/2020/2/19/fran-drescher-still-slaying-us-her-sass-and-class.

[10] Isabelle Kliger, “From Pose to Euphoria: Drag Race Stars on the Best Queer TV,” The Guardian, April 8, 2020, theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2020/apr/08/from-pose-to-euphoria-ru-pauls-drag-race-favourite-tv.

[11] Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966), 279.

[12] Pamela Prince, “Words with: Fran Drescher Talks Success over Struggles ‘In My Own Words’ on REELZ,” LATF USA, last modified August 14, 2020, latfusa.com/article/2020/8/words-with-fran-drescher-talks-success-over.

[13] Wolf, A Problem Like Maria, 41.

[14] Quoted in Wolf, A Problem Like Maria, 137.

[15] Jenny Fran Davis, “High Femme Camp Antics,” The Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly Journal, no. 28 (2020), lareviewofbooks.org/article/high-femme-camp-antics.

[16] Quoted in Davis, “High Femme Camp Antics.”

[17] Dommu, Sass and Class”; Richard Ouzounian, “Fran Drescher Having a Ball in Cinderella,” Toronto Star, April 11, 2014, thestar.com/entertainment/stage/2014/04/11/fran_drescher_having_a_ball_in_cinderella.html.

[18] Quoted in Wolf, A Problem Like Maria, 178.

[19] Wolf, A Problem Like Maria, 178.